As either a thank you for turning him over, or an f-u to show how much better at this game they were, the unit “invited” Captain Birla and me along as observers.
The word “invited” is in quotes because we were told about the raid twenty minutes before it happened.
Some people want company, and others don’t. It was going on midnight, and Captain Birla was at home sleeping. It would have taken him nearly an hour to get over to the raid site anyway, so he demurred.
I, on the other hand, happened to be only five minutes away, just leaving my post-dinner briefing session with the Garud brass. I found the command post with plenty of time to spare.
It was a panel van parked up the hill a block from the house. Inconspicuous, except for the guys who kept climbing in and out of the back.
Just as I got there, I saw a white flash at the bottom of the street. This was followed by a loud boom.
Flash-bangs, I assumed — they’re moving in.
A second or two later the night turned red. The ground rumbled beneath my feet. I got two words out of my mouth — “Oh, shit” — before I felt myself being thrown backward by the shock of an explosion. When I got to my feet a few seconds later, I saw that the entire block was in flames.
Igor wasn’t going to be singing for anyone now.
( III )
Twelve members of the security force lost their lives in the explosion and blaze, so there’s little sense in berating them about the decision to go in. Apparently they used tear gas grenades as well as flash-bangs, and a spark from one of the grenades had ignited a store of gasoline bombs in the house.
Or not. Maybe it was rigged to explode if attacked. Maybe Igor pressed the detonator himself.
The place was such a mess that I don’t think it was possible to say exactly what happened. There was gasoline and kerosene in the place, but whether it had been fashioned into bombs or stockpiled for some other reason, I couldn’t say. There was plenty of fertilizer, which was the main ingredient of the boom. Plastic explosive was recovered — the stuff doesn’t ignite in fires, though I wouldn’t go hitting it with a hammer. So at a minimum the house was used as a weapons depot, if not an actual bomb factory.
The nearest neighbors had been quietly evacuated just before the action, so there were only minor injuries among civilians, but needless to say it was another low point in a series of low points. The tangos were theoretically on the run, yet it sure looked like they were kicking ass.
The house that blew up was definitely connected to People’s Islam; its founder’s cousin had bought it several years before. The compound where the helo had been seemed also to have been a People’s Islam property, though that connection was less clear. There were a few other circumstantial links as well, making it seem pretty clear that the helos and the escape from Special Squadron’s jail were both People’s Islam projects.
Where was India for Islam in all this?
Funny you should ask.
According to everything Sean was hearing, our raid into Pakistan had killed two of the group’s leaders and sent those we hadn’t killed scurrying under the biggest rocks they could find. Pakistan was now monitoring their communications. Most of what they had heard since the raid were brief messages aimed at trying to ascertain who was still alive. But right after the explosion of the safe house, one of the surviving India for Islam members sent an e-mail to another:
God’s wrath is just.
Now, I suppose that could have been meant as a generic rah-rah-rah statement, praising the death of infidels. But the news reports of the incident — the explosion and fire were far too large to go unnoticed — all followed the government line that claimed a major terrorist site had been destroyed. The reports claimed four men had been killed, all members of People’s Islam.
(Why or where they came up with four dead I have no idea. As I said, the only terrorist actually killed was Igor, who had been alone in the building for at least twenty-four hours.)
None of the stories included any information about casualties among the Indians.
So why was Islam for India crowing about it?
Because they hated People’s Islam?
It was the only thing that made sense.
* * *
“What we need to do is review the intelligence we got on India for Islam,” I told Captain Birla when I saw him after talking with Sean. It was the afternoon following Igor’s immolation. “Everything that led up to the raid in Pakistan.”
Captain Birla blinked at me. He’d been trying to catch a nap in his back room, grabbing some bunk time before the stadium operation we had planned that night.
“That is a lot of data.” He rubbed his eyes. “Why do you want it?”
“I want to see some of the sources.”
“Well. OK. But it will take time and the Games are only a week away. The athletes are already arriving and — ”
“I can do it myself. I just need your OK to get into the files.”
Captain Birla agreed, and I started going back through the files. I’d seen most of it before, and it would have been ideal to have someone else go through it with a fresh eye. But Doc was busy with the team, and the other likely candidate — Junior — was off in the hills on his wild goose chase.
* * *
It wasn’t really a wild goose chase — there are no geese in India. But Matt had set off without knowing what he was looking for or what he wanted to find.
Check that — he knew what he wanted to find: something that would say he was right about his hunch that the helicopter or helicopters we’d chased weren’t actually the ones that were stolen. What exactly that proof would be, though, he had no idea.
Not necessarily a bad thing. Youth needs space to recon.
Shotgun and Mongoose accompanied him on the trip. They rented a Land Cruiser and headed out early in the morning. Getting out of Delhi took more than two hours; after that, they didn’t have much traffic until they ran into a herd of sheep a few miles from the compound. After some wrangling with the local police helping guard the place, they got out and had a look around.
The ruins of the main building were still smoldering. The Garud commander had made it clear that they weren’t to disturb the ruins, but I doubt his orders would have stopped them if they really wanted to poke around.
They didn’t need to, Junior claimed, because he found “a clincher” right away.
What could follow here is a long technical discussion about helicopter undercarriages and weights. I know how excited you are to read several pages worth of charts and graphs, so I’ll substitute the layman’s version:
The Bell JetRanger sits on skis. The Ahi rests on wheels that are folded up during flight.
Junior found a set of impressions where the helicopters had sat before taking off. According to him, these could only have been made by a JetRanger, or a very similar helicopter.
He took photos. I’ve seen the photos. Maybe the lines in them were made by helicopters, and maybe they weren’t. There were a lot of marks in the small field there, not only from explosions, but from the helicopters that had brought the assault teams.
For the record, though, the Hind lands on wheels.
“Very distinctive pattern,” said Junior when I pointed this out. “Very different from the Ahi. Let me explain…”
You’ll have to wait until he writes his own book if you’re truly interested in double-tire nose wheels and undercarriage spans. The bottom line is, in his mind he had evidence that the helicopter(s) we had chased were not the right ones.
So, you’re wondering, where were they?
I’ll let Junior explain. This is from his after-action report:
I could understand why the terrorists had dressed the other helicopter up — they wanted to confuse the Indians and throw them off the trail.
It seemed to me that with all the reconnaissance going on, the helicopter had probably been in place for a while. That fit, really — the guys we were dealing with had obviously
been planning this for some time. So this place was all a blind or a deek, a ruse they would use if they were followed — as it turned out they had been.
Obviously, they must have had some other way of getting out of the country. Or not getting out of the country. Because as Mongoose said, it’s usually better to do the opposite of what everybody is expecting you to do. That’s pure Red Cell think, and SEAL philosophy as well.
In my mind, though, the heist of the helicopters was related to the Commonwealth Games. If they were hiding the helicopters, it was because they were going to use them during the Games. It would be a spectacular assault. I closed my eyes and saw it: sixty thousand people in the stadium, gathered for the final track and field competition. The camera follows a javelin as it flies upward. Then all of a sudden, it lingers — there’s something else in the air.
The helicopters. They begin their assault. They could wipe out the stadium in a few minutes. Then they could fly across town and crash into the government buildings for an encore.
Good creative theory, with sound reasoning and a novelist’s imagination — throw in his purple prose, and no doubt he’ll be writing these things someday.
But there were problems with Junior’s theory. Most obviously — if the helicopters hadn’t been taken to the site, where did they go?
Junior, Shotgun, and Mongoose started trying to figure that out as soon as they left the compound. The nearby village had no other place suitable for a helicopter landing, but they looked around anyway just to be sure. Back in the SUV, they took out the satellite photos and maps of the region, examining different spots as possible helicopter landing areas.
In theory, you can put a helicopter just about anywhere. They don’t need all that much space to land. Here in the States, the parking lot of a small mall or even a large front lawn will do nicely.
But there were no shopping malls in that part of India, and the larger fields were regularly checked. That’s not to say it wouldn’t have been possible to get in, but if they landed in one of the fields, they would have had to hide the aircraft pretty quickly. Which meant they needed either a large building nearby or some way to get the helicopters away from the field by truck.
Starting from the area where the Mi-8TV had run out of fuel, Junior diagrammed a large semicircle where he figured the helicopters could have gone before they, too, would have run out of petrol. The area was 150 miles long and pretty damn wide. But he decided he could cut it down by eliminating a lot of the area very close to the Pakistani border, since the air force had had planes there very quickly. He also assumed that it wouldn’t include the area the air farce had raided, since why would you lead anyone near your hideout?
In the end, he came up with two dozen places where he thought the helicopter could be. Then they set out to check them.
* * *
Trace in shorts is a beautiful thing, but Doc in a kilt — very rough on the eyes.
They both showed off their knees that same afternoon as the Scottish field hockey team scrimmaged against Pakistan. Security was heavy, and we were on serious alert.
Yes, Pakistan was part of the Commonwealth and would be at the Games. So why would Pakistan want to disrupt them?
The answer was that they didn’t. While Pakistan had backed many radical groups in the past, it was generally an expression of the old “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” theory. But as Pandora learned, the forces of evil once unleashed cannot be controlled.
Pakistan had slowly been waking up to this. They cooperated, albeit reluctantly, in the Mumbai investigations. They had been somewhat cooperative with the intelligence efforts before the Commonwealth Games. They have cooperated with the U.S. against the Taliban. Maybe if things go along without further complications, they might even become an effective counterterror force … say, two hundred years from now.
But the day of that scrimmage, tensions were pretty high. Newspapers and blogs were accusing them of having stolen the helicopters, and being behind what was called The Terror Bomb House where Igor had checked out.
Which made the atmosphere at the field hockey game absolutely rabid. The crowd adopted the Scots, knobby knees and all.
They were backing winners. Trace scored two goals in the opening period, and the Scotsmen never looked back.
When the Pakistani team was called for a raised stick early in the second period, the crowd began throwing things onto the field. It looked for a moment as if there’d be a riot. Trace took matters into her own hands — she raised her hands to calm the crowd, then stepped up and took the penalty stroke, flicking the ball past the diving goalie for the score.
That settled things down somewhat, but the Pakistani team still had to run a gamut of abuse to reach their bus at the end of the match.
“If something happens at the Games,” Doc warned me later, “there’ll be a bloodbath. People will lynch the Pakistani athletes. And that’ll just be the beginning.”
Or the end, depending on your point of view.
* * *
Later that evening, just as the sun was about to set, Junior and the others pulled into the lot of an old train siding about a hundred miles northeast of Delhi. They’d already searched more than a dozen spots where Junior thought the helicopters could have landed without finding a trace.
This looked like one more. It was an asphalt parking lot serving a building that was no longer there. Strewn with glass and small rocks, it had been abandoned for at least a decade. The macadam, though old and broken up, was still plenty strong to hide any evidence that an aircraft had landed there.
A train passed as they were walking back to the Land Cruiser. It blew a long, wistful wail from its horn. Shotgun turned and watched it.
More from Junior:
I realized that something was wrong, out of place, but I wasn’t sure what it was.
I saw it as soon as I pulled out the satellite photo, which had been taken a few days before, by the commercial service we subscribe to:
There had been two large freight cars parked on the siding. Now they were gone.
Bingo!
When we drove back to Delhi, I double-checked the area with Google Earth. Their satellite photo, which had been taken the year before, showed no cars at that siding. Based on that, I went to our service’s archives and started paging through. They had images roughly every twenty-two days. The cars were not in any of the photos.
That’s when I started looking into the possibility that the helicopters had been moved by train.
The tracks that Junior had found belonged to a small line. The siding was not used that often — which made it easier for him to track the records down.
Two cars had been left there a week before. They’d been picked up the night that the helicopters disappeared, transported to another line, and then delivered to a train yard in Delhi.
The train yard near the slum our little friend Leya lived in.
And, according to the railroad records, the cars were still there.
( IV )
Junior gave me an info dump on the train cars about two hours before Special Squadron Zero was scheduled to deploy on its stadium operation. I decided to check the cars out myself.
We met at the traffic circle just outside the slum. By the time I got there, Shotgun had detoured over to one of the food vendors and bought what looked like apple turnovers. They were actually samosas, vegetable mini-pies, a meal for some, a two-in-the-mouth-at-a-time snack for Shotgun, who tossed them down like M&Ms.
“Hey, skipper,” he said, crumbs falling from his stuffed mouth. “Hungry?”
I shook my head and asked Junior where the trains were.
“They ought to be in that siding over there, on the other side of the houses,” Junior said. He pulled out a printout of the satellite image.
I was just looking at the page when a pint-sized cyclone jumped onto my back.
“U.S. Dick! You have come to visit!” yelled Leya. The little monkey slid off my back and hung down from my neck.
Cute kid. Did I ever mention I hate cute kids?
“Hey, little thing,” said Shotgun. “Hungry?”
“I am hungry, Mr. Mountain,” she said, jumping up and snatching a samosa from his hand. She wolfed it down even quicker than Shotgun could have.
The boys bought her and some of her friends food while I studied the images. The cars were parked on a siding right up next to the slum. There were several places they could be watched from, both inside the housing area and in the train yard itself. We’d have to check for lookouts first.
That was a problem, since we didn’t exactly look like we belonged there.
But the children did.
We went at it systematically, working over the spots where the lookouts might be point by point. Leya or her friends would run by the spot quickly while we watched. If nothing happened, we moved in and made sure the place was empty. Then we moved on to the next spot. It took about a half hour before we were sure that no one was watching from the slum side of the yard.
The kids thought it was all great fun. By the time we were done, it was obvious that we were looking at the train cars, and Leya declared that she would run and climb on top of them to tell us if there were any “bad boys” as she called them.
“No, pipsqueak.” I gave her my best growl, then channeled my inner chief, conjuring a crusty seadog snarl. “This isn’t a game.”
“Oh, yes, fun game, U.S. Dick.”
“You oughta be sleeping,” I told them. “Don’t you have school tomorrow?”
This was apparently the funniest joke in the world. All the kids nearly bent over with laughter.
Shotgun came up with a solution.
“Before we play the train game,” he said, “let’s get some ice cream.”
The kids all thought this was a great idea, though they weren’t sure where the nearest open vendor might be.
“The farther the better,” I told him.
* * *
We approached the cars from the slum side, working out from a stack of rusted steel drums used for drinking water. A deep set of shadows covered most of the approach. Mongoose took point; Junior was behind him and I trailed.
RW16 - Domino Theory Page 20
